The aesthetics of sameness: A contextual analysis of the large and small Herculaneum woman statue types in the Roman Empire.

What explains patterns of visual homogeneity in a diverse society? An emphasis on visual uniformity in the early and middle Roman empire seems to contradict what we know of regional, cultural and social differences around the Mediterranean. This dissertation addresses that tension by studying honorific portrait statues with individualized heads and typed bodies. The two most popular female statue types, and the subjects of this study, are those known as the Small Herculaneum Woman and Large Herculaneum Woman. From the Augustan period until the early third century C.E., from Syria to Spain, such portrait statues replicated the same body forms in astonishing numbers. And yet, this phenomenon has been ignored or simply dismissed in terms of Roman copying of Greek originals. I take a different approach, asking who commissioned these statues, whom they represented, in what kinds of spaces they were displayed, who saw them there, and to what effect. This contextual analysis permits an assessment of these forms' immense popularity in the early Roman empire and of the conceptions that affected their appearance, commission and reception there. The two types were first adopted into Roman art in early imperial Italy, where the statues served to express new ideals of public femininity and played a role in the transmission and reception of Augustan and Julio-Claudian ideology (Chapters 1 and 2). The second century C.E., by contrast, saw the greatest numbers of the statues as well as their broadest distribution across the empire. In this period, the types were part of the self-representation of local elites, especially in the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean, and served as elements of a visual rhetoric of public status and identity (Chapters 3 and 4). This visual replication helped construct civic elites from around the empire as a culturally unified group regardless of the diverse traditions and histories of the regions from which they came. Case studies from Spain, Greece and Asia Minor explore how this worked in practice and provide insight into the varying legitimation strategies of local elites in the empire (Chapter 5).PhDAncient historyArchaeologyArt historyCommunication and the ArtsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132019/2/9938553.pd